Challenge: Make Dutch the dominant world language

No idea how I get to this point, not being my time period but, I was listening to Within Temptation today and I thought, how would you make Dutch the dominant world language, basically having it take the place of English in otl?
 
New Netherland needs to be a lot bigger and end up conquering the rest of eastern North America, the way the British colonies did. Basically, create a Dutch-speaking United States.

Given that the Dutch did not object to having settlers of many nationalities in their lands, this is not impossible; they could have recruited a lot more settlers. That just wasn't a major point of emphasis for them IOTL.
 
New Netherland needs to be a lot bigger and end up conquering the rest of eastern North America, the way the British colonies did. Basically, create a Dutch-speaking United States.

Given that the Dutch did not object to having settlers of many nationalities in their lands, this is not impossible; they could have recruited a lot more settlers. That just wasn't a major point of emphasis for them IOTL.

You'd need to have all Seventeen Provinces absorbed into the Dutch Republic for that to happen. For the non-Dutch speakers in that territory, maybe it would be like South Africa where the ethnic French/Walloons assimilated into the Dutch/Afrikaans speaking Afrikaaner identity.

And while we're at it for the Dutch-wank we'd need to create this, have the Dutch hold onto South Africa and expand their control to Angola plus everything south of the Zambezi River in Africa (and fill it with Afrikaaners/Cape Coloured), have the Dutch take Australia, give the Dutch Brazil too, and make it so Indonesia (plus Malaysia) maintains Dutch as a very important language so much Indonesians speak Dutch as a second language. And more Dutch holdings in Africa like Gold Coast and elsewhere.

Is this even remotely possible or totally ASB as I think it probably is?
 
Have a large scale Dutch invasion of England along with the Anglo-Saxon migrations and then have the Dutch territory conquer the rest, having their language become the dominant one and eventually going on to carve up large areas of the Earth later on X)
 
The Dutch are too small in numbers to really dominate linguistically the way the English, French, or even Spanish did.

However you might be able to get Dutch to proliferate as a "Language of Commerce" sort of thing. The best way to do that I think is to have a Habsburg State composed of the entire Netherlands, possibly via Charles V having more Sons. This State would be extremely wealthy and likely provide a great deal of the trading infrastructure of the wider Habsburg Empire, and while it alone would be vulnerable to outside states like France, it would have guaranteed allies in the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs which, combined with no 80 years war, would probably ensure it remains pretty well defended.

This strengthens the wider Habsburg Empire and allows Dutch to spread through the entirety of the Spanish, and possibly Portuguese Empires as a Trade Language.
 
To be fair, the Portuguese managed to found a colony which today has some 180 million people speaking Portuguese, with a smaller European population than the Netherlands, so I don't think a major overseas expansion of the Dutch language is impossible, especially if we go back to the 15th century for PODs.
 
Vague premise: Have the Dutch conquer Brazil fully and keep control of Portugal's African colonies. Encourage immigration from Germany and Scandinavia to the Dutch colonies, especially the New Netherlands, Southern Brazil, and the Cape. Have the Dutch overrun British and French North America over the course of the 17th and 18th century, early enough that the English-speaking populace can be assimilated over time, much like the French colonists in the Cape.

By 1800, natural population growth has several million Dutch speakers spread over the North America, Brazil, and the Cape, albeit their familial origins are primarily from northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England. A large portion of this populace in all three colonies is composed of African Dutch speakers descended from slaves; some are slaves, some are freedmen.

Having continually crushed the English and Spanish on the seas, Dutch dominion over international trade is supreme. The Dutch have managed to acquire several key Caribbean islands in the form of Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and several smaller West Indies islands. Dutch Brazil stretches over South America, having seized the Rio de La Plata region from Spain in the late 17th century, as well as secured the entirety of the Guyanas as a buffer from invasion from the Spanish Main.

In the Cape, Dutch control over Mozambique, the Cape, and Angola have ensured that the entirety of Southern Africa is informally dominated by the Dutch. Increased settlement by Scandinavian sailors who decide to settle down, Catholic Irish expats entranced by the promise of religious freedom, and German peasants fleeing constant warfare in Germany by an ever expansionist France has seen that the Cape is thoroughly Dutch with a population of half a million Dutch subjects in 1775. The discovery of gold in the interior of Southern Africa in 1775 has driven a mad rush of fortune-seekers from Europe and to a limited extent from the Dutch Indian and East Indies possessions as the Dutch sought to quickly populate the region in order to reap the profits. The population of Dutch Southern Africa has more than tripled in size by the year 1800 and is experiencing some of the highest natural growth rates in the world due to the availability of lands and semi-temperate climate as the goldseekers settle down, often taking native wives due to the lack of available women, as the majority of immigrants were men.

North America's Eastern Seaboard is dominated by the Dutch colony known as the New Netherlands; due to an early seizure and in some cases destruction of the English colonies during a period of English political instability, the majority of the New Netherlands is Dutch-speaking albeit there are sizable minority populations and in some areas, pluralities of English speakers. The only area of majority English speakers is located in the old region formerly known as New England, albeit the language has been steadily fallen out of popular use outside of homes due to the irrelevance of English in North America. As a result of conciliatory Dutch policy, the former New England is well-integrated and holds as healthy a fear of France in Canada as their Dutch overlords do in their own homeland. The Dutch are seen as overlords, true, but they are also valued to a strong degree due to a fear of religious oppression and destruction from a French conquest of the region. The Spanish control what we would know as Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the mouth of the Mississippi River with a string of forts; populations are incredibly sparse in the region and the lands are seen as a drain on Spanish finances. The only notable Spanish settlements in the interior of North America north of Mexico is the city of Rio Largo(New Orleans) and Colonia Sacra(St. Louis), commonly referred to as Sacra. These settlements are primarily military in nature, Sacra especially, although the regions have slowly increased in population naturally as some of the past soldiers of the forts had children with local women. The Spanish hold an active fear of French imperialism on the Mississippi, which is why they've established forts along the river.

The East Indies are utterly dominated by the Dutch with most states either actively paying tribute to the Dutch East Indies' governor based out of Batavia. Dutch, albeit loaning heavily from Portuguese and Chinese, is the lingua franca of East Indies trade, having coopted Portuguese as the dominant tongue after the seizure of the vast majority of Portugal's colonial empire. The Dutch have continuously threatened Manilla in their multiple wars with the Spanish and also maintain an iron grip on East Asian trade, being the primary intermediary between China and Japan, due to their control of the ports of Macau and Nagasaki, as well as the island of Formosa. Recently, the Dutch have started exploration and preliminary settlement of the 'Last Continent' commonly known as Terra Australis, or Australia.

The Netherlands are also the primary power in India, as well as the Indian Ocean in general. Having seized Goa shortly after independence, Portuguese feitorias fell into Dutch hands over the years and the Dutch became the premiere European power in India, albeit still contested by the French and to a far lesser extent the English. The Dutch have complete control over the island of Ceylon, having conquered the Kingdom of Kandi early into the 18th century.

Relations between the Dutch and France are far from amicable. The Dutch fear French designs on their southern provinces, while the French view the Dutch as the primary enemy in their goal of obtaining a strong, profitable colonial empire. Over the last two centuries, war between the Dutch and the French has usually resulted in the Dutch fighting as defensively as possible on land while slowly losing ground to France, while the Dutch bombard and blockade Metropolitan France from the seas and either burn or seize their colonies. Peace usually arriving shortly after, returning land in the Netherlands in exchange for French colonies. Haiti has been captured so often and used in order to broker peace by the Dutch that it's known as the 'Trade Chip of the World'. Still, the Dutch do well to fear the French as they've slowly eaten more German lands, approaching the dreamed-of Rhine frontier. As a result, there is a begrudging understanding between the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Dutch. In exchange for the Dutch ignoring the religious internal struggle of the HRE and encouraging the migration of the worst of Germany's religious dissidents, the HRE and Dutch coordinate in order to counter the French. The Spanish Hapsburgs are far less satisfied with an alliance with their former enemy, but a combination of family loyalty and fear of French encroachment on Catalonia has ensured a degree of cooperation in the loosest sense of the world against French aggression.

....well, that's pretty much it. The Dutch are set to dominate the world, if not at all in Europe. The Dutch may very well lose the Netherlands but win the world through soft power and their colonial legacies.
 
@EMT: Conquering Brazil and the Eastern Seaboard is plainly impossible, the Dutch were heavily dependent of the Portuguese settlers to do anything in Northern Brazil to the point the Settlers were the ones to kick them out once the Dutch went from "do whatever you want, you don't even have to pay debts!" policy from Maurice of Nassau to actual colonialism from the following Governors.
 
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